I don't donate to Wikipedia because they need money. I donate to Wikipedia because I think they are a force for good in this world and I don't believe there is such a thing as a free lunch.

Wikipedia is an institution that has improved my life and I think that deserves investment.

I think it does a lot of harm along with the good. They don't seem to enforce much for policies that bias any article that's non-technical. Also they redonate a lot of donated money, some of which goes to some dubious places. I would think that's reason enough to not donate.

Truth is biased. I am OK with someone taking a stand on what the truth is and the fact there are meta discussions on what the truth is is reassuring. If someone thinks Taiwan is a part of China, they are going to feel like an authoritative source of information describing Taiwan as a sovereign country is "harmful."

Fascist ideology doesn't want the idea of truth to exist and Wikipedia weighing in and saying "this is the best approximation of truth we got" is a small but powerful assault against fascist ideology.

The purpose of free speech is to protect speaking truth to power. If there is no conception of what truth is then how can one speak truth to power?

"Dubious donations" seems like the epitome of FUD.

Every nontechnical article is full of selective quotes, from borderline random people, which have no place in an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia has facts. That's not what Wikipedia even tries to do. If it wasn't auch a great source for the sciences I would be ok with it going away.

> That's not what Wikipedia even tries to do

I think it’s exactly what Wikipedia tries to do. But given the scale of things its not going to get it right every time.

> Fascist ideology doesn't want the idea of truth to exist

Fascism:

Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans [..] In some cases, however, potential harms to the populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication. - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2

Science Must Not Be Used to Foster White Supremacy [..] For another thing, scientists must do some soul-searching about why they are so motivated to look for evidence that traits like intelligence or propensity to violence are written in our genes, or that they would be different for people in different racial groups. - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-must-not-...

The National Institutes of Health now blocks access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may enter “forbidden” territory. - https://www.city-journal.org/nih-blocks-access-to-genetics-d...

"some of which goes to some dubious places."

As Wikipedia would say... [citation neeeded].

Things like this, for example: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/09/08/wikimedia-fo...

If users support these organisations, they can donate directly, especially given that most Wikimedia donors have no idea their money is not being spent on Wikipedia itself.

I wasn't a fan of those grants but it was a one time thing they did that was a relatively small portion of their budget.

What is dubious about Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), the Borealis Philanthropy Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, Howard University School of Law and the Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice (IIPSJ), InternetLab, STEM en Route to Change (SeRCH) Foundation, or the Media Foundation of West Africa? I've poked around to each of them and haven't found any scandals. Do you just not like the values of these organizations? I wouldn't think "dubious" is the right word then. Also, if you didn't like their values, it doesn't make sense to donate to wikipedia, an organization that implements the same values.

According to tax forms just released last week, the outgoing Wikimedia CEO Katherine Maher got $623,286 in severance pay in 2021:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim...

She made a total of $798,632 that year.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/14/Wikim...

Another manager who had been there for less than two-and-a-half years got $324,748 in severance, more than 100% of her salary in her last full year of employment ...

Discussion on the Wikimedia mailing list:

https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...

Also, $100 million have gone into an "Endowment" that has never to this day, in nearly a decade of existence, published audited accounts. Report in Wikipedia's community newspaper:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

Promises have been made for years that the Endowment, held by the Tides Foundation, would "soon" be registered as a separate 501c3 nonprofit org and start filing public accounts ... still hasn't happened.

> I think it does a lot of harm along with the good.

You said "also they redonate..." so you seem to consider that a separate issue. Thus, what "harm" have you found wikipedia to have done, specifically?

Donations don't pay the authors and editors.

> I don't donate to Wikipedia because they need money. I donate to Wikipedia because I think they are a force for good in this world and I don't believe there is such a thing as a free lunch.

If you donate to an organization that doesn't need the money, you might as well assume that money will be wasted on something with the similar societal benefit as a party full of hookers and blow.

There are valid criticisms to be made of wikipedia's spending (like any large org), but i always thought this article is stupid.

Yes, wikipedia's hosting costs increased over time from when it was a tiny site that was down constantly and super slow, to a top website with multiple data centers and high reliability.

It would be a red flag if that didn't happen.

And Wikipedia keeps a complete version history of every edit made to every page, doesn't it? I just think about how large a single git repo can get and imagine that at scale.

Also, slightly tangential, but the little blurb at the top of that essay is my favorite kind of Wikipedia-y snark:

> "WP:CANCER" redirects here. For editors who improve Wikipedia's articles about actual physical cancer, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Hematology-oncology task force.

Yes. It does get good compression ratio though as different versions are similar (although i dont know if wikipedia still does recompression). Storage by itself is not a particularly expensive part of the app.

You can actually download the whole thing if you want.

The images are a much bigger issue than the text, I would fancy.

Let's not say "hosting costs". Actual hosting costs are less than $3 million a year:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/26/Wikim...

$100 million or so are now spent on salaries.

I think an earlier version of the essay focused much more on hosting.

It should be noted that when you run your own data center that means that money that would have gone to AWS as a "hosting cost" now gets spread around to other sections. Its cheaper overall but shows up in different sections.

There are things i disagree with about how wmf spends its money, but just saying it spends too much money without breaking it down is meaningless. As an absolute number it is way lower than comparable websites. Maybe its spent on wrong things, but to be convincing you need to actual talk about how its wrong. Saying zOMG WMF pays about 1% of what equivalent companies pay in salaries,is not convincing that they are overspending.

Well, I definitely thought that the $600+K severance for Katherine Maher was too much. It's 150% of her salary. Same for Janeen Uzzell pockeding $300+K in severance after only having been there for two years and a bit.

Plus the now-cancelled Knowledge Equity Fund disaster seems to have been their brainchild. I know, nobody is perfect, cock-ups happen everywhere, etc. But the conduct and transparency around money just has never been that stellar at Wikimedia. (The Endowment has made it worse.)

The other aspect is that Wikimedia has always made it sound like they needed money to keep Wikipedia up and running, while having eight-figure surpluses year after year and continually growing their headcount. At least that has now somewhat improved for the moment, but it took a revolt by Wikipedians to make it so:

https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-fou...

Left to their own devices, the Wikimedia Foundation would just have continued what they were doing all along.

Its not like i disagree with any of this (while tbh, i dont really know how severance works for execs and what is appropriate, so no opinion on that). I just find people gesturing at the total sum of all the money and saying its too much is really uncompelling. The argument needs to be more nuanced than that to be compelling.

In my personal opinion, the real waste at wmf is being penny wise and pound foolish (or to give the appearence of being penny wise). That and the rotating door of poor upper management has everyone working in circles and at cross purposes from each other. Its an organization that doesn't know what its trying to achieve so doesn't achieve it. Many of its problems could probably be solved by spending more money doing less things but doing them better.

Raises some interesting points, but is horribly cynical. It does appear that Wikipedia has enough money in the bank, though.

Jimbo still has my vote though.